“I Was Tortured By The Pygmy Love Queen”!
By Jeremy Lovell Reuters – Friday, March 28 01:04 am
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LONDON (Reuters) – Self-help manual
“If You Want Closure in Your Relationship,
Start With Your Legs”
won this year’s oddest book title competition,
The Bookseller trade magazine said on Friday.
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The book took an impressive one-third
of the 8,500 votes cast online in The Bookseller’s
30th annual competition.
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Runner up
“I was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen”,
the story of a fictitious World War Two pilot
forced to bale out over the jungle,
polled a distant 20 percent.
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“‘If You Want Closure’, makes redundant
an entire genre of self-help tomes.
So effective is the title that you don’t even
need to read the book itself,”
said the magazine’s deputy editor Joel Rickett.
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The winner beat stiff competition
from other shortlisted titles including
the somewhat niche “Cheese Problems Solved”
and “How to Write a How to Write Book”
and the rather provocative
“Are Women Human?
And Other International Dialogues“.
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The annual competition was launched in 1978
at the Frankfurt Book Fair when it was won
by the memorably titled
“Proceedings of the Second International
Workshop on Nude Mice“.
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Since then, with the exceptions of 1987 and 1991
when no award was granted due,
according to Rickett, to a lack of oddness,
the weird and wonderful titles have
flowed thick and fast with some
eyebrow raising winners.
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“Joy of Chickens” took the 1980 title,
with “The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling”
in 1983,
“Lesbian Sadomasochism Safety Manual”
in 1990, “Living with Crazy Buttocks”
in 2002 and “Bombproof Your Horse”
in 2004 are but a sample.
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However, the 1997 winner
“Joy of Sex: Pocket Edition”
does stand out among the glittering array,
and in September this year the public
will be asked to vote for the oddest
of all the winners.
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“That and ‘Nude Mice’ probably remain
among the weirdest, but it is a strong
competition,” said Rickett.
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“And the quality of weirdness
does seem to be improving in part
as technology allows greater access
to publishing. Certainly we are getting
more titles coming forward,”
he added.
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